2007-10-06

How to become a word guru?

If you have seen the popular american TV series "Prison Break" Season 2, you must have got a deep impression by the character T-bag.



What made me surprised is his fancy grammar / vocabulary. He can use different words to describe one thing. This ablity comes from his childhood, when his father forced him to recite a whole american english dictionary!

From the script of Episode 17 "Bad Blood":
YOUNG T-BAG: Ten synonyms for destroy. (closing his eyes, remembering) Annul. Mutilate. Liquidate. Abrogate. Quell. Ravage. Expunge. Demolish. Extinguish. Extirpate.

I always find me short of words, no, no, no, I don't mean I cannot say any word, but only quite normal words, like "destroy". :-)

Internet provides a lot of possibilities to let us learn something online. I used to learn those synonyms of words from the GRE-preparing book. Now we have a better way to explore the world of words - Roget's Thesaurus of English words and phrases.

With the word "destroy", I got 60(!) result with the same meaning of "destroy". So, it's really time to learn some thesaurus [thi-sawr-uh s] if one wants to become a word guru. Like a chinese proverb says: There is no royal road to learning.

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